March 25, 2009
Strange and sordid
I’ve spent the last few evenings so outrageously tired that I was seeing double, and the mornings drinking excessive amounts of orange juice. I’d self-diagnosed with diabetes, but now I think I just happen to be cranky and craving vitamin C. I no longer feel like sitting at a desk to type, but when I lie down on my back, I’m unable to breathe, and I don’t yet know how to type on my side. Baby is currently kicking my computer, having spent the entire day pummeling me from the inside, which makes me happy actually, nothing to worry about. I slept better last night (except for strange sordid dreams involving Tom Selleck and fondue), and feel tonight I might not actually lapse into a coma at 9:00. Also it is raining=spring.
I am now reading Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist. Her books are never actually so enjoyable, and always take me an age to get done, but they’re worthwhile and so various. Last night I finished reading Doubting Yourself to the Bone by Thomas Trofimuk, as recommended by Melanie. It was a beautiful, strange book, a poet’s book, I think, which might not be everybody’s thing, but I liked it, and didn’t even get bothered that it was mostly in second person. I think she’s right that this is one that leaves you thinking for a while. And now I’ve got a zillion other books lined up on my to-be-read shelf, and I really ought to step up because my wee kicky baby’s due date is just two months away.
March 23, 2009
The Believers by Zoë Heller
As a novelist, Zoë Heller’s tendency has been to write against her readers’ expectations. Certainly, readers accustomed to her “single-girl-about-town” newspaper columns during the 1990s were uneasy embracing Willy Muller, the nasty piece of work/wife-murdering protagonist of her first novel Everything You Know. Readers were hard-pressed to find sympathy for either of the two main characters in her second novel Notes on a Scandal, which all the same went on to be shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and received acclaim as a film.
Her third novel The Believers has something more of convention about it than the other two. Reminiscent of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty in that it is a domestic novel of ideas written by an English novelist about America, Heller this time has created an ensemble piece about the Litvinoff family, crusading left-wing lawyer Joel, his wife Audrey, their daughters Rosa (who has recently converted from athiest socialist to Orthodox Jew) and Karla (who has started cheating on her bland Union official husband), and their adopted son Lenny the deadbeat. When a stroke puts Joel into a coma, the family must realign itself without its centre of orbit, and each character is significantly changed in the process.
The novel begins in 1962 London when Joel and Audrey first meet at a party. He stands apart from the crowd, older and American. She notices that as he’s listening to others talking, he’ll periodically lean back onto one foot and mime throwing a ball. He notices her too, intrigued her seeming sense of dignity, “[b]ut he was anxious to have it done with now– to be told the trick of it. A girl who could never be talked down to would be exhausting in the long run.” And it is through a series of misunderstandings that these two people, within a day of meeting one another, end up signing on together for the rest of a life. Near the end of which is where the novel formally begins a page later, in New York in 2002.
The Believers is a book about faith, about the nature belief, though of course like any truly successful novel of ideas, it is also a book about people. Joel is only slightly dealt with before the coma writes him off, but we get a sense of his charisma, of perhaps its obsolescence, and that, for a multitude of reasons, he mightn’t have been the easiest man to be married to. This is underlined by the woman Audrey has become forty years after meeting him, the latest of Heller’s “nasty piece of work” characters. She’s the kind of woman who “tells it like it is”, even when it isn’t, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, or pander to anyone, and carries a sense of superiority for all of these traits. She’s disappointed in her daughters, indulges and enables her deadbeat son, and is in general quite impossible, offensive, and an absolutely marvelous character construction who absolutely rings true.
That the other characters are less realized in comparison really says more about Audrey. Their characters also formed in such reaction to hers that they will be more predictable, understandable, while Audrey might be compared to that proverbial bull in a china shop or a ticking time bomb. This would especially be the case now that she’s lost an anchor to her self in Joel, and more over their entire marriage has been undermined by a woman who’s turned up claiming to be Joel’s ex-mistress, the mother of his three-year old son. The revelation shattering illusions about Joel, and forcing his wife and children to redefine themselves in light of this now altered sense of who he was.
In The Believers, Heller illuminates the faith necessary to try to live a life without faith. The way in which politics and even family can become a surrogate religion, filling up the void. And also the faith required to sustain a marriage, to raise a child, to save the world, and the strange nature of the kind of belief in that such things are even possible.
March 19, 2009
In addition
I’m now reading The Believers by Zoe Heller, who I’ve loved a long long time. On the weekend I read Anne Fleming’s Pool-Hopping, which, in addition to being swim-lit, was a stellar collection of stories. In light of her latest book Life Sentences, the remarkable Laura Lippman’s top ten memorable memoirs. Today I was sent a link to Based On Books, an interesting review site of books-based films. The Flying Troutmans is named to The Orange Prize longlist. Charlotte Ashley’s Tangential to a History of Reading points to significant flaws in Sydney Henderson’s literary character. And on literature and returning soldiers.
March 16, 2009
Life Sentences by Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman is a remarkable writer, and I come bearing proof: she is a female writer of popular fiction who garners New York Times reviews. She is an established crime writer successfully expanding her literary horizons (when lately we’ve often seen it the other way around). In her latest novel Life Sentences, her main character is a fifty year-old silver-haired woman with a (beside the point) voracious and oft-satisfied sexual appetite, and how often do we encounter such women in popular culture at all?
I first encountered Lippman with her 2007 novel What the Dead Know, a stand-alone book (Lippman is known for her Tess Monaghan PI novels) that was critically acclaimed and won the 2007 Quill Award, and I read her short story collection Hardly Knew Her not long ago. I’ve been impressed by her ability to cultivate suspense, to challenge her readers with unsympathetic characters, to effectively use language and literary references, and by her blunt and unflinching prose.
I wasn’t as immediately drawn into Life Sentences, however, perhaps due to the fragmented nature of the narrative. Eventually, however, this method made sense. The centre of this story is Cassandra Fallows, best-selling author of two memoirs, and poorly-selling author of a new attempt at fiction. The story begins with her catching a news story on television about a woman who refuses to disclose the whereabouts of her missing child. The reporter referencing a similar story from twenty years before, about a woman called Calliope Jenkins in Baltimore. Cassandra, a Baltimore native, realizing that Calliope Jenkins had been one of her school mates, and deciding that within this coincidence, the buds of a new book might lurk.
Lippman constructs her own story with Cassandra’s pursuit of this bud (in third-person), excerpts from her memoir Her Father’s Daughter (about growing up in the shadow of her formidable academic father, who abandoned their family for a woman he met in the race riots following the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King), and third person accounts by others involved in the Calliope Jenkins case– her lawyer, the detective, old school friends of both Cassandra and Callope–none of whom have any interest in talking to Cassandra at all.
There are two reasons for their reticence, and for the school friends in particular, it’s because they don’t trust Cassandra. They’d been portrayed in her previous memoirs, in ways they claim are grossly inaccurate, and resent Cassandra’s tendency to make herself the centre of every story she tells. They don’t remember their unit being as tight as Cassandra does, picturing her more on the periphery of their experience. Particularly galling, they find, is how Cassandra had taken the story of King’s death and ensuing riots, making these events the backdrop for her tenth birthday party.
But some of these friends also have something to hide, as do the officials involved in the Calliope Jenkins case, who have never recovered from the experience of dealing with this woman who refused to talk. From the knowledge also that somewhere out there is a dead child, and that nobody was ever able to find him. Like much of Lippman’s crime fiction (and interestingly enough in relation to Cassandra’s own relationship with fact and fiction), Calliope Jenkins’ story is based on an actual case. Lippman has Callie living now an anonymous life in Delaware, having been freed after seven years in prison. Cassandra Fallows is determined to find her, and though sources try to thwart her at every turn, such thwartings are telling of the characters committing them, and Cassandra only presses on.
Lippman accomplishes not such a sleight of hand in crafting this story, the revelation being less-than startling, but the story’s own substance in the point instead. Metafictional dealings with fact and fiction, the nature of memoir and memory, a main character whose reliability is undermined from the very start (and complicated by the fact that she’s oblivious to this). Cassandra Fallows who talks too much, and Calliope Jenkins who doesn’t talk at all, and yet somehow between them the story must be told, which Lippman manages deftly.
March 12, 2009
A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine) by Patricia Pearson
Though I’ve never considered myself laid back (or at least not since I faced a chorus of laughter this one time when I suggested that I was), I’ve never known anything like the anxiety I’ve faced during the last six months since finding out I was pregnant. Numerous times I’ve remarked how fortunate it is that I’ve had no real problems during my pregnancy, seeing as I’ve managed to drive myself absolutely crazy with the imaginary ones. Concocted, I think, because for some reason I’m unable to believe that things are going well without physical evidence of that fact, or any real control over its occurrence. That I’ve never been so powerless has sent me into a semi-permanent state of panic, and so I decided to read Patricia Pearson’s book A Brief History of Anxiety (Yours and Mine)— now out in paperback– in order to make some sense of what I’ve been feeling.
It is sort of ironic, however, that I turn to a book in order to understand anxiety, a book whose thesis is that anxiety is so prominent in our society because rational thought sells us short. Because we’re the kind of people who think our thoughts and emotions can be summed up and explained in a book, just say. But still, Pearson manages this. Her book’s effectiveness partly due to its unique approach– part memoir, part history, all readable and fascinating.
Pearson contextualizes her own experiences with anxiety through a close cultural and historical analysis of the phenomenon. And phenomenon does tend to be the right word– incidences of anxiety are unprecedentedly high in the Western world at this point of time, and Pearson seeks to make sense of this. Suggesting the culprit might be that “implausible myth: that we can assume mastery over our fates.” Which began out of the middle ages with the development of “reason as a new mechanism for keeping anxiety at bay… Reason– or rationalism, more specifically– evolved out of a need to impose order on a world that was both fraught with danger and haunted with ghosts.”
But the ghosts creep in, or rather, the holes in rationalism are all too apparent. Life in its randomness can be absolutely terrifying, particularly for those of us privileged to have become far more accustomed to order and control.
Pearson’s personal experiences colour this history– she writes of her first breakdown, of childhood incidence of fear and anxiety (which occurs, Pearson explains, because of the amygdala (“which act as the sensory headquarters of mammalian fear, [sending] out five-alarm panic signals” to the cerebral cortex, which in a child is “a work in progress, [so] she cannot yet rationally assess the threat…”). She writes of our acknowledgment of anxiety disorders, which weren’t diagnosed years ago, though there have always been people suffering from “nerves” (so-called to in order to make mental problems physical, and eliminate the stigma). Pearson uses her experience as a crime reporter to illuminate our relationship to fear, as well as our attraction to certain versions of it. She also deals with her reliance on anti-depressants, which became an addiction, asserting that these medications are over-prescribed by doctors who are sold by big drugs companies, and have no real understanding of what these medications do.
A Brief History of Anxiety made me feel better. Though hardly a self-help guide, or a typical memoir at all, it was such a pleasure to read, such a relief to see my own experience reflected, and to understand that it takes place in a context outside of myself. What a pleasure also to learn so much in general, a fascinating education. Plus, it’s funny– Pearson is an excellent writer.
March 8, 2009
Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant
Bookwise, “quirky” is a demeaning term, and it only gets you so far. A grander scheme has to be in play in order for a quirky book to mean more than that, and so it is fortunate that in her first novel Come, Thou Tortoise, Jessica Grant so deftly pulls the strings. Fortunate because her premise is so intriguing, and the book itself is so physically appealing, that the substance of the story itself has an awful to live up to.
So what is with it with Audrey Flowers exactly? For she’s a strange one, certainly, the product of a rather unconventional upbringing, and in possession a decidedly unconventional point of view. She’s referred to, lovingly, as Oddly, and this is the main thing about her, I think– that she is loved. When she finds out her father is ill and she must fly across the continent from Oregon back to her home of St. John’s Newfoundland, she has friends with whom she can leave her pet tortoise Winnifred, and, however eye-rollingly, they do accommodate the tortoise’s special needs. Upon arriving at home, she’s surrounded by friends and neighbours wanting to take care of her, and when the Christmas light technician finally falls in love with her, in no way are we surprised or unconvinced.
There is much left unexplained in Come Thou, Tortoise, which is its point– upon returning home Audrey realizes there is much she doesn’t know (or has chosen not to know) about her background, and the rest of the story is of her pursuit to fill in the blanks. But Grant takes care not to explain too much to the reader either, not pathologizing Audrey. Though she does have a low IQ, she discovers, when she phones home to tell it to her father, and realizes that “what I had assumed was a high score was not a high score. It just sounded like a high score. It sounded like a not-bad grade, the kind of grade I never got in school.” But she isn’t stupid, she has friends, is utterly charming at times, and adept at the most surprising things– disarming an air marshal mid-flight, for example, and then hiding in the plane’s bathroom with the gun, refusing to believe they weren’t all being hijacked.
The narrative is unconventional, and every so often Audrey’s point of view is interjected by that of Winnifred the tortoise back in Oregon. Who is the voice of reason, as she serves her purpose as a bookmark/papermark in a collection of Shakespearean plays. But there is reason to Oddly Flowers too, an order to her skewed universe which we come to understand as her story progresses. Her narrative enhanced by simple artwork, and also her employment of wordplay, strange spellings, short and abrupt sentences and paragraphs. Grant plays with language in order to show us Audrey’s point of view, to show us Audrey herself, and though the result is quirky as you like, it is also utterly real and convincing.
The grander scheme here at play, however, is not even the fascinating character development at work, but rather something far more fundamental– plot. As the story progresses, mysteries deepen, and it’s a race to the end to see what is what. And what is what, as you might imagine, is not what is expected, nor perfectly clear, but it’s nearly perfect. As is Audrey Flowers herself, and this altogether marvelous and clever book.
March 4, 2009
Like acid-washed jeans
I really enjoyed Meghan Daum‘s collection of essays, My Misspent Youth. She comes by her Joan Didion comparisons honestly, except I laughed out loud at Daum’s work, and however much I revere Joan Didion, she’s never made me do that. For a sample, could I please refer you to “Music Is My Bag”? “I grew up surrounded by phrases like “rattle off that solo,” “nail that lick,” and “build up your chops.” Like acid-washed jeans, “chops” is a word that should only be invoked by rock and roll guitarists but is more often uttered with the flailing, badly timed anti-authority of the high school clarinet player.” Oh my, yes.
March 2, 2009
From the "I should have known better…" file
Do NOT read Andrew Pyper before you go to bed at night. This tip I picked up reading The Killing Circle last year, waking up in the night convinced there was somebody lurking at the bottom of my stairs, even hiding under the bed, or standing over me watching while I slept, so I was not to move a muscle. But I thought I would be safe with early Pyper, with his short story collection Kiss Me. (It had been a gift from the lovely Rebecca Rosenblum after all). And it was the story “Break and Enter” that finally did me in, so that I woke up at 2:30 this morning, not convinced the man was actually gone, the one who’d been standing over me ready to kill me in my dream. In order to shake off the fear, I then had to rouse myself into a state of wake that would last for over two hours. During which I was distracted when the baby kicked, and worried baby wouldn’t kick again when it didn’t. And then when I finally managed to fall back to sleep, I dreamed I was being chased by a wild boar.
I don’t think he had anything to do with the boar, but still– do NOT read Andrew Pyper before you go to bed at night.
March 1, 2009
Pickle Me This reads Canada Reads: The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay (trans. Sheila Fischman)
I’m sure there are reasons involving the nature of translation and French-Canadian prose which might explain why Michel Tremblay’s novel The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant makes such little use of line breaks, paragraphs and even chapters. My own hypothesis, however, involves Tremblay’s creative intentions, that his book constructs not so much a narrative as a day, a neighbourhood, as life itself (see Woolf’s essay “Modern Fiction”, noting in particular, “Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores on the consciousness.”) Life itself, you see, does not come with line breaks, and paragraphs, and neither do neighbourhoods, particularly those partial to scenes of chaos, cacophony and carnival.
Such is the kind of neighbourhood depicted in Tremblay’s novel, the Plateau Mont Royal on the second day of May, 1942. The novel presided over by a Greek-style chorus– Rose, Violet, Mauve and their mother Florence, unseen by all except cats and crazy people– knitting booties on the balcony of a tidy yet apparently abandoned house: “We’re here so that everything will keep moving ahead. What’s knitted is knitted– even if it isn’t knitted right.” And move ahead indeed everything does, as the rue Fabre awakens, its residents starting their days, niece and oncle in one particular house staging a race to the bathroom.
It is in this house that the fat woman lives, too old and too fat to be pregnant, but she is, risking her health. She’s confined to a chair in her room, listening to the sounds of life inside her crowded apartment. She lives with her two sons, her husband and his mother, brother, sister, and her two children, and in such close quarters, tempers flare, dramas are enacted, bodies excrete, are washed, make love, and make life. The woman is ridiculed for the state she’s in, for exercising a degree of agency in her reproductive life. Six other women on the street are also pregnant, but each of them are more burdened than blessed than the fat woman, who is having a baby just because she wanted one. Though this is also WW2, during which men with pregnant wives are exempt from the draft, French Canadian men in particular reluctant to fight a war for the English, or for France who they see as has having abandoned them.
The novel takes place over the course of one day, various plot lines connected by geographical proximity. Following the fat woman and her family, their various neighbours, including the two local prostitutes, and the fabulous cat Duplessis, all presided over by the knitting sisters. The story takes turns both hilarious and tragic, characters marvelously wicked and cruel, driven by whims, driven by passion– there is everything here. Like life itself. The novel actually driven by life, or at least its promise, punctuated by baby kicks: “She rubbed her belly. The baby had just moved and her heart contracted with joy.”
This is a political novel, written during a political time, but even more importantly, the novel is far more than that. It achieves universality even in its specificity, and I read it divorced from its context– I don’t know Montreal well, the history and culture of Quebec I know only in the vaguest terms. What remains, however, is a wonderful piece of Literature, which was not the sense I got from The Book of Negroes once its context was taken away. I did get such a sense from Mercy Among the Children, but that book never came alive to me the way this one did. The way Fruit did too, which was literary in spite of its accessibility, and whose simplicity might have obscured the various planes on which it worked. (I liked Fruit‘s ending, so terribly haunting, not at all what one would have expected for a book that was bright pink).
What counts against The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant is that it’s difficult, work to get into, though once I was hooked it was a pleasure. But reading did require a fair bit of revisiting, maps on the endpages, diagrams in the margins, there were several bits I did not understand, necessitating a rereading. But how engaging is that? A book that can’t be skimmed over, that you have to work to get inside, but once you’re there, you’ve earned it. The book is yours. So I’m going to go along with the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable, that Canadians are smart enough to be so challenged. That we get the kinds of novels we deserve, and so The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant would really be quite the compliment.
Final! Pickle Me This reads Canada Reads Rankings:
1) The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay (trans. Sheila Fischman)
2) Fruit by Brian Francis
3) Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards
4) The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
5) The Outlander by Gil Adamson
February 28, 2009
Sing Them Home by Stephanie Kallos
Stephanie Kallos’ novel Sing Them Home is a little bit of everything. Imagine Alice Sebold meets Wally Lamb meets Fannie Flagg, and then they all get spun up in a funnel cloud. Imagine a 500+ page novel that goes by like a breeze. This is one of those comfortable books you crawl your way into, and linger long inside, happy and warm. But then that the novel is well-written also almost seems like too much to be true.
Sing Them Home is the story of the Jones family, whose three siblings come together after their father’s death– he is killed on the golf course, struck by lightning. The family having long ago been left fragmented by their mother’s disappearance, when she “went up” with a tornado and her body was never found. So that the Jones children are practically strangers to one another– art history professor Larken lives her adamantly independent life far from her hometown of Emlyn Springs, seeking solace in eating; her brother Gaelan is a well-known weatherman and bodybuilder who seeks his solace in meaningless relationships; and Bonnie the youngest who has stayed closest to home persists in cycling up and down country roads seeking garbage she interprets as “artifacts” from the ditches.
The novel’s course is the year following their father’s death, during which the Jones siblings struggle to come to terms with their grief, as well as with finally reconciling with the tragedy in which they lost their mother. Emlyn Springs the backdrop for all of this, a small town in Nebraska, quirky characters populating its dying streets, but Kallos does something remarkable in making Emlyn Springs somewhere quite particular. With its Welsh heritage especially– reflected and really outlined here in language, rituals and traditions– as well as characters far richer than small town cliches, the town becomes actually not a backdrop at all, but is as much of a character in the story as its residents.
In similarly dealing with specifics, Kallos also makes each of her characters’ individual perspectives utterly convincing. Larken’s world is seen through the prism of an art lover, all colours and tones, while Gaelan’s profession is fascinatingly explored, clearly an integral part of his life. Bonnie, the more whimsical of the three, is never quite as pin-down-able, always a little bit more flighty, but this is also the very point of her. Kallos’ narrative switching back and forth between these characters effortlessly, encompassing also the perspective of their father’s mistress, and diary entries interspersed representing the voice of their long lost mother.
So the dead speak, which means there is magic here amongst the solid realism. Some bits so utterly fantastic, bordering on sentimental, that indeed it can seem like too much to be true. The ending in particular so perfectly tidy (but perfectly satisfying!), all its ends tied, but then how could we bear any of them to be left straggling? Such tidiness not quite the way the real world works, but then thank goodness we have here a book instead.
